The first snows had come.
The flakes
fell gently.
They were large now, unusually so –
but it was only
the first snow,
and always had large flakes.
It was cold, and time itself had frozen, or at least that is how it seemed.
No sound, no wind, no brightness, no darkness – nothing
save the faintest crinkle
of crystal
upon crystal,
flake
upon flake,
snow
upon snow.

The birch had begun
to droop
slightly
under their growing load, as if wearing
ermine cloaks
upon their naked, spindly bows.
Conifers rose
from the ground
like malformed ghosts clad in uneven, crystalline shrouds –
ghost that,
like time,
had frozen
where they stood.

Amid the freeze a small
stream kept
strangely
active, but even its
merry tinkle had been
silenced
by a slush of ice that slowly
grew like a malignant cancer, consuming the
freedom of the
waterway’s flow.

She had almost vanished,
a spectral
member
of the frosty scene in her own right.
White snow upon
white skin,
eyes the color of the dying stream and hair
the color of youngest bark of birch –
these a flickering,
shimmering image
half concealed
by the white static of
snowfall.

No divots attested
for footfalls –
what
might have been now flawless
under whitest sheet, like tracks of fae
upon the ground. Those that fell from sky
with her,
the rejects of the airborne way,
dissolved into featureless day
when they
parted.

The billows of translucent
silk lay
lightly
upon her slender form. Wrapped in feeble testament
to love of what
had been, the myriad folds now
flattened by the touch of
fallen
icy
down, betrayed
by tangled, knotted strings
that stretched
like natal cord from her down
to the
stream.

What once was hers to wear
and
dignify,
now gone, was sacrificed for life
of those not there.
Parting gifts,
borne of parting with sweet sorrow,
whose bitterness
too had frozen.
They who now were not
had thought
the final parting come, but touch of chilling
angels stilled
and slowed the soon to be.

A rising wind caught the silk,
which
billowed
and shed its downy coat,
stirring up the satin hair that flowed.
In doing so, it showed,
a crimson halo.
A smiled parted
porcelain lips,
as the unseen sky stared down
into
unseeing eyes
with tender touch as if regretful of
what it had wrought and soon would
be done.
The first snows had come.
The flakes
fell gently.